LRSF # 5, The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French, Peter S. Beagle

Opening: Once upon a time, there lived in California a Frenchman named George Moscowitz. His name is of no importance--there are old families in France named Wilson and Holmes, and the first president of the Third Republic was named MacMahon--but what was interesting about Mr. Moscowitz was that he had not always been French. Nor was he entirely French at the time we meet him, but he was becoming perceptibly more so every day.

Capsule: So THIS is what people are talking about when they speak in reverence and awe of Peter Beagle's short fiction. I've been living under Martian soil. There was clearly great delight in Beagle's working out of the consequences of his mystifying and ironic premise--an ordinary American mysteriously starts to become French, a cultural transformation that happens from the inside out--and there is more than delight in its reading. The story is wry, assured, quirky, clever, funny and touching all at the same time. Beagle surrounds the central conceit with such deft detail that we cannot help but believe it is true. 'Once upon a time' indeed.